[caprese]

Their A/B test told them to do it, without wondering if they should do it

Basically their engagement numbers were better for a larger amount of people by making search engines counterintuitive for early adopters.

We personally need a good robotic search engine that indexes like a robot. Everyone else needs a semi-sentient thing that makes many assumptions about what they want to see.

[luckylion]

> Basically their engagement numbers were better for a larger amount of people by making search engines counterintuitive for early adopters.

Which also makes sense ... if you present the "right" result immediately, the user visits one site and has completed whatever he sought to do. if you make him click through 10 pages, he has way more chances to see an interesting ad.

[caprese]

Good points although in Google’s case the first several results are ads and their main users cant differentiate and dont care even if they could, followed by amp pages by the most engaged webmasters optimizing for relevancy

That user wants fingerprint based ads and recent articles

Google is optimized for that

We are the only ones that want a “search engine”, a service distinctly good at indexing the known universe, instead of merely presenting the paid and compliant universe

[mirimir]

It seems like DDG is getting lots better :)

[reitanqild]

Lately DDG has started to ignore parts of my query just like Google do, or even worse.

I still use DDG as I find it generally less annoying but I really don't get why they too had to start behaving like the pre-Google search engines.